


Kate - As If John's Life Were Not Bad Enough...

by JohnHHolliday (Methleigh)



Category: 19th Century US RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 18:06:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Methleigh/pseuds/JohnHHolliday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And Wyatt and John paid her to leave him alone forever and ever and ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kate - As If John's Life Were Not Bad Enough...

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece with a happy ending. Nevertheless, it _is_ disturbing and it _is_ rated NC-17 for graphic almost-sex, violence and language. If you will wish you had not read it, please stop here. John is in fact embarrassed and reluctant but resigned to speak of Kate this once. He surely does not want pity (tm). For remember, it has a happy ending.

John lies naked on the bed, his body warm and gently steaming from his bath. The pleasant scent of soap, mingled with his human one of subtle ocean and earth, rises into the room. He is relaxed back on pillows, inclined to close his eyes and perhaps dream. With sympathetic honesty his uncle had told him that these days would come – when he would not be able to will his cock to rise. At the time it had distressed him badly. It had been one more sorrow with which he must not burden Mattie’s beloved young life. Since then he has grown accustomed to these... failures.

But now, professional hands try to rouse him. Even though his skin is still silky and he has not yet acquired his later scars of disease, there is the perpetual cough and the startling thinness. He is rarely touched. Kate does not move him, but she saved his life so he is compliant if not eager. She is coarse and concerned only with appearances. Besides, she fights in the street for trade. Wherever he moves, she follows him, for his money and cachet. He is the best with cards and guns, and a genuine gentleman bound to support her and give her both necessities and luxuries. His life is a debt, with ever accruing interest, no matter how much he pays.

Her mouth is skilful on him, and he tries to will himself hard. If she is satisfied, she will leave him alone, he knows. When she rises though, his sweet little cock curls softly and damply against his thigh. Her voice hisses angrily as she seizes his ear. “Concentrate. I don’t want this to last all day. You’re hard enough when you think of others. Close your eyes and _try_.

Obedient, and hopeful of avoiding further such instruction, he tries hard, squeezing his eyes tight. But with ministrations he forgets to look intent and returns into himself, where he enjoys the air touching his warm body and the smell from the bath. He imagines himself lying in summer by the Withlacoochee River, flowers infusing the air...

There is a frustrated scream. “Fuuuuuuck.” His body jerks rigid, and his eyes fly open. And then it is he who is screaming, as his balls and still-soft cock are squeezed viciously in a grasp of talons. “I thought I told you to concentrate, you useless pice of crap. I don’t know why I even bother with you. You ain’t good for nothing.”

His gun. It is all he has to protect himself, fragile as a baby. It is always to hand. Unable to shoot or strike a lady, or even a woman, he fires almost blindly into the wardrobe. At the retort he is released, though the claws draw bloody stripes down the sensitive white of his inner thigh. He curls protectively, still on his back.

And then the poker is coming down on the bed next to him, violent and sudden. “Turn over, you fucker. Or I’ll beat you to death. I know what you like, and I know how you like it. I’ll fuck you with this until your guts bleed.”

No. He still has the gun and snaps his legs down, toes reaching for the bedstead to gain purchase in case she tries to turn him. “Fuck you. I’ll blow your fool head off, Kate. Fuck _you_.” Panic and rage.

“Oh, you’d _like_ that, wouldn’t you? You pathetic... nothing.” And the poker clears his dressing table – his shaving things, the little toothglass and the jewelry chest, ewer and basin. And the poker smashes the mirror – long shards of quicksilvered glass in the fine thick carpet. “I’m going to get me a _real_ man.”

And Kate flounces out, unscathed, to find a random cowboy.

And John folds his wrists over his groin and stares at the tin ceiling he had paid for – a touch of beauty in this terrible west. He still holds the little self-cocking lightning and though he keeps it carefully from his agonised self the muzzle burns his scarlet thigh. But the rest of him is cold, so cold, and he begins to shake, his skin shrunk to goosebumps. He does not move his stiff body, and it seems as if he can never move again - as if Kate and all the gunfighters in the world could tear him apart unfeeling, his mind taking him away, away.

No, it does not quite work, and then he is just shaking. His eyes fill with salt that trickles untouched down his temples to fill his ears and wet the pillow. He has no expression. His eyes are simply open, his mouth is simply closed, and his brow is smooth. He is so cold.

“Holliday’s beating his woman again,” They come to say in the street, and he answers with a curl-lipped sneer. His arms are so slim they would fit in the circle of a child’s thumb and forefinger. He cannot walk a block without stopping to catch his breath. And Kate? Kate is huge and hale, tough and crude. She starts brawls with the other whores.

And Kate follows him. In every new town to which he travels, she eventually comes, like a curse. And he always takes her back, out of duty.

She buys him sentimental gifts, then destroys them in a rage when he does not show enough gratitude. She berates him in public for not showing him enough affection. When he is bold enough to tell her he does not want to 'lead her on' she turns on him in private, slamming, shrieking and destroying his things. She chastises him for being too stubborn. And too compliant. She chastises him for being too vain and arrogant. And for lacking self-confidence. She chastises him for spending too much time at work and with his friends. And tries to convince him he is dependent upon her. He never knows what to expect.

Ribald and lewd, she takes to prodding him with her thumb in the tender private area of his backside to make him jump. He takes to folding a protective flannel into his trousers. At night too, she prods him awake out of his sparse and fitful sleep to complain of his heat, his small movements, his cough, the sound of his breath, the space he occupies. At night he wraps himself in a narrow turn of blanket at the edge of the mattress as far from her as possible, where he may keep from being roused, and where she believes he belongs because she is larger and deserves the majority of the bed.

Sometimes he tries to imagine with enough strength to conjure: the sense of another, pressed snug to his back, holding him close, breathing softly into his hair with a reassuring arm about him and a warm hand soothing his often aching concave belly. With fever and will, his imagination grows titanic.

He is not ruined; not destroyed. Kate does not break him. He knows he still wants touch, affection, tenderness, and to make love. He wants his small dream, without letting himself hope for it, unlikely as it is. Or even sex, which is still more impossible. He knows it is just Kate, this horror. It is just Kate. Not him, not others. And he waits for her to pass, to get bored as she always does, to leave for a time before her inevitable return.

Eventually Kate comes with him to Tombstone, to Wyatt’s admitted stunned dismay. Eventually she tries to have him killed and the debt he owes her is rendered void. Eventually Wyatt helps him and they give her $1000 to leave him forever and ever and ever.

And he never sees her again.


End file.
